The National Seed Strategy: Growing Enough Native Seed to Restore Public Lands

Severe wildfires and extreme climate events often devastate healthy ecosystems in parks and on other public lands. Yet when the fire passes or the floodwater recedes, there is not enough genetically appropriate native seed to restore the land.

That is changing. The National Park Service, other Interior Department agencies and the U.S. Forest Service — 12 agencies in all — work together under the National Seed Strategy, with other public bodies and private companies, to identify native seed needs, build lasting capacity to supply it, and collaborate across ecoregions. Funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (its ecosystem restoration programme, signed November 15, 2021) has made much of the work possible and sped it up.

According to NPS ecosystem restoration coordinator Lori Makarick, the law is helping the agencies move from a project-by-project focus to restoring entire ecosystems.

Islands of restoration

Before, most restoration and revegetation on public lands happened piecemeal:

• as part of individual construction projects;
• after disastrous weather or fire in one area, usually affecting a single park or part of a national forest;
• in one-off efforts to control invasive plants.

Projects sat on figurative islands — within the NPS, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation or the Forest Service — and restoration specialists felt they were never catching up, always short of locally appropriate native seed. Few U.S. native plant species are sold commercially in the quantity, diversity and quality needed, Makarick says, and in most of the country native plants and seed of local origin are rarely available.

The vision, in the words of NPS restoration ecologist Katie VinZant, who coordinates the Park Service's infrastructure-funded seed projects: "the right seed in the right place at the right time." She calls the law a game changer, both for its money and for its push towards coordination among agencies, partners and private companies.

A Yellowstone National Park biological technician transplants sprouted seeds into cones. Credit: NPS / Jacob W. Frank.

Why local seed, and why so much

Native plant communities adapt over time to their elevation, weather and soil. They sustain biodiversity, conserve water, prevent erosion, and give wildlife habitat and food. Seed from local sources keeps genetic diversity and gives restoration the best chance of success.

But harvesting large amounts of seed, again and again, from wild native plants can harm them and the wildlife that depend on them — and the amounts needed are massive. So the Park Service is moving towards collecting small amounts of seed in parks and growing it in crop-like settings, where larger quantities can be harvested. It has dozens of large projects across parks and regions planned, and other agencies have large needs too.

• Growers. Native seed comes from a small, specialised part of the seed industry, and each batch takes several years of lead time. Working across ecoregions and agencies smooths out swings in demand and reduces uncertainty for producers, helping keep them growing what is needed as extreme weather, fire and invasive plants keep battering degraded ecosystems.
• Investment. From 2022 to 2024 the Park Service invested nearly million from the infrastructure law in increasing native seed capacity. The next step is restoration itself.

Collecting sagebrush seed in Grand Teton National Park. Credit: National Park Service.

Projects under way

• Whitebark pine — restoring this federally threatened tree in national parks in Washington, Montana and Wyoming, against disease, beetles, changing fire and climate change. Unchecked, those threats would cause irreversible losses of the trees, of their role in slowing snowmelt and so limiting erosion, and of food for wildlife including the threatened grizzly bear.
• Workhorse species — building the Park Service's and partners' capacity to collect, grow and store native seed of the species most used in restoration.
• Alaska — more native seed and native vegetation, especially along rivers around salmon habitat and at hazardous mine sites, with the new Alaska Native Plant Materials Working Group.
• Wind Cave National Park and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — seed collection and plant propagation with the Intertribal Buffalo Council's Buffalo Seedkeepers and the Chicago Botanic Garden, respectively.
• Appalachian parks in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania — turning farmland into native grassland to add to the parks' ecological and cultural value.
• Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, Colorado — converting 500 acres of degraded rangeland to shortgrass prairie and sage shrubland, with the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, and Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

About the strategy

The National Seed Strategy, a joint effort of 12 federal agencies, aims to:

• build a nationwide network supplying the seed needed for ecological restoration;
• identify the research needed to develop genetically appropriate seed and better production and restoration technology;
• give land managers research-based tools for choosing and using the right seed.

Restoring ecosystems serves the Park Service's mission to conserve natural and cultural resources for this and future generations — and healthy ecosystems help people, wildlife and plants adapt to a changing climate.

Sources

• National Park Service, "New Strategy Changes Project Level Approach to Whole Ecosystem Restoration" (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — Ecosystem Restoration). https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/bil-er-nationalseedstrategy.htm
• Corrected: "Chicago Botanical Garden" (the Chicago Botanic Garden). The cover image of the strategy, credited to the Plant Conservation Alliance, is not reproduced.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.